Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s net worth is $6.3 billion, but if you’re a turd, you’re a turd, and all that wonderful cash can’t buy you a better personality. There’s a video to prove it: Bloomberg obtained footage of Kalanick getting into a heated argument with an Uber driver. Uber is having an absolutely miserable year, from high-profile sexual harassment allegations to an astoundingly successful boycott campaign against the company.

On Sunday, we learned Donald Trump eats his steak well-done with ketchup. If you’ve ever eaten steak—in Trump’s case, an expensive, tender piece of New York strip—you probably know that well-done with ketchup is simply not the way to go. The president should give medium-rare a try, not only for the sake of his palette, but because eating overcooked meat may increase your risk of cancer according to almost 50 studies.

HMD Global, the Finnish company that owns the rights to Nokia’s phone brand licensing for the next ten years, took the stage at MWC in Barcelona today to showcase its first full line of Nokia-branded smartphones. The company revealed two new budget Android phones, and announced that the flagship Nokia 6 launched in China earlier this year would be getting a global release.

Free-roaming wireless power has been a dream of engineers since the days of Tesla and Edison waging their war of innovation but a number of technical hurdles have prevented it from becoming a reality. The folks at Disney Research have revealed that they’ve successfully built a method to provide full coverage of an average room and power all the devices one might need.

Twitter is a great way to communicate directly with everyone from Kim Kardashian to President Trump. Even the Pope is on Twitter, providing a direct line to Catholicism’s top dog. But lately people have been taking the phrase “Is the Pope Catholic?” less as a rhetorical device and more as a literal question. We recently wrote about a tweet from Pope Francis that said the Bible asks us to welcome migrants and foreigners. Many Twitter users were not happyabout that.

Everybody knows by now that the delivery drone ambitions of companies like FedEx and UPS amount to marketing stunts. But what happens when those stunts don’t go quite as planned? UPS knows because it recently crashed a delivery drone in front of a bunch of reporters. Dreadfully named “The HorseFly,” the new UPS octocopter docks with a fancy hybrid version of the iconic brown delivery trucks. The whole process is kind of neat.

My appetite for goofy propaganda is nearly endless. Old Soviet videos about capitalist sharks? Hilarious! Anti-communist cartoons from the 40s? Silly stuff! But the new movie about to hit theaters in Iran hits a little too close for comfort. It’s called Battle of Persian Gulf 2. The 88-minute-long animated feature shows Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard handily beating the shit out of the US Navy. There’s a nimble tank that shoots a big gun at US troops.

In what appears to be a violation of the federal ethics rule that prohibits a government employee from using “his public office for his own private gain, for the endorsement of any product,” Ajit Pai, the controversial new chair of the FCC,tweeted and subsequently deleted praise for Amazon’s PrimeNow service. “Needed something in pinch & decided to try @amazonprimenow. Very impressed! Item was cheap & arrived early.

To no one’s surprise, AT&T will offer a new unlimited data plan for all of its customers starting tomorrow. The move comes approximately 30 seconds after Verizon made a similar move. The only difference: AT&T’s offering is spendy as hell. The new plan will cover talk, text, and data on four lines for the wallet-busting price of $180 a month. Well, it’s only $180 a month with a “$40 credit for 4th smartphone line.

Border Patrol agents got lucky a few days ago when they spotted several people running away from a section of border fence near Douglas, Arizona. After going to investigate, the DHS employees discovered a catapult and two giant blocks of weed. You can guess what the catapult was for. That’s right: it was for slinging weed over the wall from Mexico to the United States.